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Hugh Pickens writes "Newsweek reports that first there was a violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile in 2010, then a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on February 22, and now the recent earthquake in Japan. Though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often — not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable — followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate's far side. 'It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate — one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year.' That leaves just one corner unaffected — the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault. Although geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, USGS studies put the probability of California being hit by a quake measuring 7.5 or more in the next 30 years at 46 percent, and the likelihood of a 6.7 quake, comparable in size to the temblors that rocked San Francisco in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1994, at 99 percent statewide."

Research performed by Larry Niven suggests that we need at least two unrelated forms of superconducting material to have minimal redundancy in the power distribution subsystems, preferably four unrelated forms for quad redundancy.

I would think the Pacific North West would be more likely as it's a more dangerous megafault like the one off the coast of Japan, that would be likely to trigger a Tsunami in addition to a large quake. Plus it's over due according to records.

Tsunamis aren't waves that travel across the ocean and destroy everything they travel under. It's a huge volume of water moving in a particular direction, usually present near the bottom of the ocean and unnoticeable at the top, and it only has the potential to do damage when said volume of water reaches land and flows a mile at high speed.

By that logic, I guess we can tell the health inspectors to knock if off because all their predictions of food poisoning outbreaks are just a statistical probability.

Seriously, people like you that suggest that these predictions aren't useful because the time frame is so long are a part of the problem. Had the Japanese heeded the warnings about nuclear reactors of that variety in an area that's subject to earthquakes, they wouldn't have spent the last week or working to avoid a major catastrophe.

A 9.0 quake could have been predicted on that type of fault. And is certainly possible in northern California. The San Andreas Fault gets lots of press because it is a clearly visible scar that runs the length of the state. It slips constantly, producing small quakes and occasionally, big ones. The lesser known danger is the Cascadia Fault [wikipedia.org], the same subduction type fault which is responsible for the recent massive quakes elsewhere in the world.

Magnitude 9.3, between 9 and 10 PM PST to be precise. [livescience.com] The only problem with this evidence is that it didn't exist at the time the Japanese were making their design decisions. The man who put the date on the event said, "There was plenty of respectable scientific opinion at the time that an earthquake of a magnitude-9 was just ludicrous. A tsunami modeler in the late 1980s could not have assumed an earthquake of that magnitude without being called an alarmist or being laughed at." All in the citation.

Yep, Consider doomsday in general. What is the optimal ammount of time for a doomsdey prophet to get his message out? He needs time to build a following, get buzz, donations, etc. When it doesn't come true he fades into the background with a modest take. If it does come true, he/she can cash in big. IIRC, Jean Dixon did this with the Kennedy Asassination. I'm not sure how she worded here prediction, or what the timeframe was; but a lot of people believe she predicted it. That got her a lucrative hor

I can predict with 100% certainty that you can't read the difference between Chile and California.

Also, lol at not understanding what the numbers actually mean and why they are useful. These earthquakes are caused by stress having been built up between tectonic plates, and the predictions give you an indication of how likely that stress is to be released at a certain magnitude. Your prediction of >7.5 with 80% likelihood the next 30 years is useless because it is an intentionally low-ball figure that

Your prediction of >7.5 with 80% likelihood the next 30 years is useless because it is an intentionally low-ball figure that doesn't give us any useful information abut the estimated stresses in the fault lines.

And yet predicting California is 'next' in line for a major quake is useless as well.
1) California is always 'on the brink' of another major quake, just like Alaska, Japan and even Chile.
2) Knowing that a major quake will happen 'some day in the somewhat near future' is worthless unless everyone in California is supposed to live each day as if it is the day of the big quake.
3) California has known about the potential earthquakes for a long time and have integrated the possibilities into their building co

The link doesn't explain why the San Andreas fault can't have a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Can anybody please explain what makes this fault line so special or immune to such devastation? I'm of the belief anything is possible. Especially when I have my Snake Plissken eye patch ready for some over the top action sequences.

Quote: "Geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, a network of "strike-slip" faults smaller and more fragmented, than the great chasm that exists where two continent-sized plates of the Earth's crust meet along the Japanese islands."

"This subduction zone beneath the Pacific, where one tectonic plate is thrust up over another, is capable of producing the biggest quakes on Ea

The San Andreas fault is a strike-slip fault, which means that at its location two tectonic plates rub against each other. That's fairly benign compared to the amounts of energy accumulating at a subduction zone (like in Japan), where one plate has to dive under another.

Actually, we've been expecting a magnitude 8+ for the last 30 years, and probably more, I can recall the last 25 of those years. At this point it's likely approaching a 9. We've only had a magnitude 5.3 and a 6.8 in the last 15 years or so on top of the regular minor earthquakes. So, we are very much aware that we're due for one.

OTOH, our mayor McJackass seems more concerned with killing our tunnel than with replacing the viaduct that we've known will go down in an earthquake ever since the Loma Prieta quake did the same thing to 880.

A bit way north is quietly rumbling "Cascadia Subduction Zone" (similar to that one of Japan) that might produce massive quake of magnitude 9 or higher with tsunami of approximately 30 meters (100 ft), but that is more of a Canucks' problem.

That's true, but don't let that fool you into thinking California will only have weak earthquakes. It's worth remembering that the 1906 Earthquake was an 8.3, which is not 'small' by anyone's measurement.

I would think the Yellowstone caldera is a more frightening prospect and more worth mentioning than the San Andreas. They both seem to me to be pretty much closely connected and one is likely to set off the other. But it never gets mentioned, probably because the prospect of the western half of the United States going through a Krakatoa-like event is rather harrowing and would drive people away from the Northwest (which for those people wouldn't be a bad idea).

First Yellowstone is a VOLCANO not an earthquake. It doesn't have any connection to the Japanese or California tragedies. Second, it has been mentioned multiple times on cable channels like National Geographic, Discovery, and History.

Third, it only happens once every tens-of-thousands of years. Last time it happened, Mammoths were still the dominant species in america. (Man had not yet arrived.) Fourth it makes little sense to discuss an event that is predicted to happen circa 10,000 or 20,000 A.D. By that point human beings might have self-exterminated or developed forcefields to contain the blast.

And (babylon) Five..... if it did happen tomorrow, there's nothing you could do to prepare for it (like moving away). Yellowstone blowing-up would basically exterminate everyone in the US/Canada, unless you were lucky enough to live upwind of the event, like British Columbia, Yukon, or Alaska. Therefore no reason for government to "prepare" for something that cannot be escaped. Even if you lived in Europe, you can expect a "year without a summer" like happened when Krakatoa blew up & dimmed the sun.

Yellowstone Supervolcano is one of those events, like an asteroid strike, which really cannot be avoided, or prepared for. It has global impact.

First Yellowstone is a VOLCANO not an earthquake. It doesn't have any connection to the Japanese or California tragedies.

That sure is some nice selective quoting you've got there. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it...:P

both seem to me to be pretty much closely connected and one is likely to set off the other.

Now I'm not saying an earthquake is capable of setting off a volcano, but your apparent avoidance of why GP thinks of San Andreas and Yellowstone as "pretty much closely connected" makes me question your motivations for posting in the first place.

I was in New Mexico when the Loma Prieta quake hit south of San Francisco. I recall watching the quake on the news. I don't recall digging trenches through meters of ashfall, which I think I would remember. So maybe Yellowstone caldera and the San Andreas fault don't have a particularly tight coupling. In fact, I glanced at the large quakes for the US, and there's no dicernable connection [wikipedia.org] at all between large earthquakes in the two regions.

Your chances of getting a super-volcano prediction correct in any given century are much greater if you predict 'no' than 'yes.' There's no reason to think it will erupt with this. It didn't last time.

The New Madrid fault (along the Mississippi River) is about to pop. It has a history of extremely violent earthquakes. None of the structures built near it were designed with tremors in mind. Ill bet there are Nuke plants along it.

And the nuclear plants will be fine. If you check, there were 4 power plants, each with multiple reactors, near the site of the Japanese 9.0 quake. All of those reactors shut down normally and survived the earthquake.

Only one of those sites is having any trouble -- and it is only because an 8m tall wall of water topped their tsunami protection wall (it was designed to stop a 6m tsunami). The water knocked out their connection to the power grid, flooded their backup generators AND the backup backup generators. It also damaged many of the electrically driven pumps. Fukushima Dai-ichi is a rare case where, due to an essentially unforeseeable event, a single cause destroyed the primary power connection, primary cooling pumps and all of the backup systems simultaneously.

You can be sure that once the situation in northern Japan is stabilized, changes will be made. Now that they know an 8m tsunami is possible they will upgrade all of the tsunami barriers over the next decade or two.

i have heard some speculation from people who know a lot more about nuke plants than i do that the facilities took more damage from the quake itself then is being told, cooling should have been restored by now if the problem was powering the pumps or even getting a new pump in place, they were saying pipes may have broken either directly from the shaking or from pressure surges, rendering parts of the cooling system unrecoverable without rebuilding.

And a 20m tsunamis wall didn't stop the water either. If you've got a wave 2000m long and 1m high, then all that water is just going to build up until it does go over the wall. The only other solution seems to be to build everything on stilts or build tsunamis channels that direct the water upwards and inland much like the opposite of a storm drain or storm channel.

then you have to be a complete fucking idiot to put the backups right next to the primaries.

No use having backup power safely at a remote site when the grid is broken. There is plenty enough electricity in Japan to run the reactor coolant system. But getting it to the plant was the problem - I think just reconnected today.

I am currently forming an investment group that is buying land around Carson City, NV and all along the Nevada and California border. With the next earthquake, our analysts expect California to drop into the Pacific making all of our land BEACHFRONT!

"buying land around Carson City, NV and all along the Nevada and California border. With the next earthquake, our analysts expect California to drop into the Pacific making all of our land BEACHFRONT!"

You might want to check out the location of the Walker Lane first. The future beach may not be where you think it will be. But in the long run you should have beaches on both sides of the rift, which would give you double the profit, minus anything lost at the bottom of the graben.

I am currently forming an investment group that is buying land around Carson City, NV and all along the Nevada and California border. With the next earthquake, our analysts expect California to drop into the Pacific making all of our land BEACHFRONT!

Yours,

Lex

If I help you out, will you give me my own city? I shall call it: San Fierro!

People have been predicting a big California earthquake for many years. Yes, it'll happen at some point but if you're really worried about it then don't live in California (or the Pacific Northwest).

And/or be prepared and don't live in a structure which will come down on you, like the one I'm in now probably will. But we could be building with shipping containers etc structures that will not come down in essentially any earthquake.

IANAS (I am not a seismologist), but I did study earthquake-resistant building construction safety as part of my structural engineering courses, which involved a fair amount of info on earthquakes and expected degree of shaking.

does anybody else remember the house cat flu episode from simpsons?
"We're here to come up with the next phony baloney crisis to put Americans back where they belong - in dark rooms, glued to their televisions, too terrified to skip the commercials."

"Though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters"

"Fucking plate tectonics, how do they work?"

Hint: It's moving in more then one direction at any given time. Think of them as slowly spinning instead of moving linearly (though they do move gradually westward due to the rotation of the earth too).

I suspect that the next 'big one' is more likely to be offshore of Washington or Oregon, on the Cascadia Subduction Zone [wikipedia.org]. The San Andreas fault zone is a strike-slip type which is more commonly associated with quakes up to about 7. The Cascadia zone is a subduction type (between three plates, just to make it interesting) where one plate is riding up over another, that is associated with quakes up to 9 or even 10. This is the same type as the one off Japan. It has historically had a big quake about every

I think people in the area are likely not prepared at all. I lived in Vancouver BC (Canada) and while its not "on" the coast, any major earthquake in the northern US especially in that magnitude is sure to have many consequences.

To be honest, the possible tsunami here isn't worth worrying about. Puget sound is largely isolated so unless the earthquake is somewhere in the Salish sea, it's not going to directly affect us. And if it is in that body of water, the amount of time it takes to react will be a lot more than we've got. Even if folks start runnning for high ground immediately.

There have been FIVE magnitude 8.5 or greater mega-quakes since 2004. This seems odd since there have only been two dozen of these bad boys since the 1700s.

Hmmmm. We're just coming out of the deepest solar minimum in the last century or more. Wonder if other mega-quakes happened around solar minima? Yup. November 1755 (Lisbon), November 1833 (Sumatra), August 1868 (Arica Peru), November 1922 (Valenar Chile), March 1964 (Prince William Sound Alaska), February 1965 (Rat Islands Alaska). Could there be a link between the solar cycle and plate techtonics? Think interplanetary magnetic fields and remember that we're riding big plates that float on a molten spinning magnet.

Step 1: Get a list of reaaallly big quakes since the 1700s. 8.5+. The interplate kind, not the run-of-the-mill intraplate stuff. You can find a list here. [wikipedia.org] Or get a fuller list of historical quakes at usgs.gov.

Step 2: Get the monthly sunspot numbers since records were kept. The Royal Observatory of Belgium has a data set here. [sidc.oma.be]

Step 3: Note the correlation between mega quakes and low sunspot numbers. The median sunspot number is 47, the median sunspot number at the time of 8.5+ quakes is 23. (Same when you move the hurdle down to 8.3+ and include a lot more earthquakes) Make an x-y scatter plot in OpenOffice Calc or MS-Excel. Visually note how many occur within a few months of solar minimum.

IANA Geologist, but I doubt there's any reliable data on earthquakes from the 1700's. Human settlement was much less widespread at the time as well so many earthquakes may not have affected many people or anyone at all, thus there was no one around to tell the story, and there were no seismometers so any Richter scale estimates would probably be based on damage to human settlements, which could have been far from the epicenter.

There is no reason to doubt the actual occurrence of the listed events in the 1700s: they really happened and the dates are well established. Granted the magnitudes are educated guesses, but these megaquakes left a significant trail in the geological record. Your doubt more likely rests on the possibility there were unrecorded megaquakes that snuck by without notice. I personally doubt that megaquakes would have gone unrecorded after 1750 (when sunspot records began) anywhere on the planet exc

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

...

It is useful to note how we happen to know about one of the great earthquakes that occurred during this period - the last great Cascadia quake on Jan. 27, 1700. We know about this one because of the "orphan tsunami" [usgs.gov] that hit Japan that day. It was a tsunami of historic proportions that appeared without warning due to a distant great earthquake. The evidence conclusively points to a Cascadia subduction zone quake up to Magnitude 9. Without the Japanese observation of the tsunami we might not know about this

OK, taking the dates from List of earthquakes [wikipedia.org] and List of solar cycles [wikipedia.org]. If we limit the range to when both sets overlap i.e. 1755 - now and split the data into buckets according to how many years the earth quake is from nearest solar cycle we find
-5 years before: 0; -4 4; -3 0; -2 0; -1 5; 0 3; 1 3; 2 1; 3 1; 4 2; 5 0.
The data does have highest numbers in the -1, 0, and 1 buckets. We can then use a chi squared test on these as we would expect 19/11 in each bucket ie. 1.73. Doing the chi squared test give

When we lived in the Pacific Northwest, I paid attention to the predictions/analysis of the Pacific/San Juan de Fuca (SJF) plate boundary. The predictions there are for a really big earthquake associated with the boundary. As I recall (and I hope some geologist will correct me if I get it wrong), the San Andreas fault is a lateral slip fault, the plates slide against each other. But the SJF fault is a buckle(?) fault. Instead of sliding laterally, the pressure builds up as the plates collide by pushing into each other, like pushing the fingers of your hand against your palm, keeping your fingers straight. Eventually, your fingers slip and kinda "sproing," creating a Really Big earthquake. Historical evidence indicates this happens fairly frequently and when it does, the resulting quake and tsunami are doozies!

Well it's going to happen eventually, even if it's not the "big one" this article is predicting, the fact is that the SJF subduction zone has an extremely violent earthquake, on average, every few hundred years. And there was a big one in 1700 [wikipedia.org]. The average is 500 years, so maybe we can get along until 2200 before the next one. Maybe not. But it will happen eventually.

The probability the big one will happen in 2200 or in 2011 is exactly the same.
500 years is only an average. Like with dices where the propability is one out of six, but that doesn't mean, every sixth throw gives the same number - all numbers are allways equally possible no matter what the previous numbers were.

I know this is rather extreme and probably rather expensive, but isn't there something that can be done to prevent or lessen earthquakes by relieving the pressure along the fault line? Perhaps a series of bombs buried along the fault, detonated simultaneously or in sequence, to cause a small earthquake instead of allowing the pressure to build up so much? Even if it were an expensive project, it'd be a lot cheaper than allowing Seattle and Vancouver to be laid waste.

If you really want to be alarmist about disasters, you should be worried about other things than earthquakes. The most rational investments (not war, and not earthquake prevention) are these:

1) Make sure we have the best possible drugs and technology for fighting microbes.2) Make sure our food supply is uninterrupted.

An earthquake can devastate a region, yes. But diseases can wipe out large segments of humanity worldwide. And diseases can also wipe out our food supply.

Look up what is happening to bananas, cocoa plants, citrus, and wheat. All of them are being wiped out by pathogens we can't really control yet. I think that most of these pathogens aren't spreading very fast, so we have time, but think what would happen if a rapidly spreading pathogen destroyed wheat production in a large area.

A rational allocation of resources would put fighting disease and ensuring our food supply absolutely first, ahead of trillions on useless wars, and yes, ahead of earthquake prevention/mitigation. However, we allocate resources based on perceived threat rather than actual risk--how else is it that we are still using coal power, and spending trillions to fight terrorism that killed 3k of us in one single year when antibiotic resistant bugs kill 50k+ of us per year?

That's right, folks, antibiotic resistant bugs inflict casualties on us at a rate of > FIFTEEN 9/11 scale attacks EVERY YEAR and the THREAT IS GROWING but WHERE ARE THE BILLIONS TO DEVELOP NEW ANTIBIOTICS????

When it comes to allocating resources in proportion to risk, we are ABSOLUTE MORONS.

The author's only claim to being a geologist is a college degree in Geology he earned in the 60s [simonwinchester.com]. For the last 50 years, this guy's been a novelist. So where's the research that says that California is _due_ for an earthquake _because_ of the other massive quakes along the Ring of Fire?

California could experience a 8.0 or greater easily. Remember, where the Japan quake struck a 9.0 wasn't "supposed" to happen. Now, we know for certain the Juan de Faca subduction zone, responsible for the Cascade range of Volcanoes is capabable of 9+ magnitude earthquakes and the devastating Tsunamis that follow. The last such even was recorded in Japan about 350 years ago and they occur every 300-400 years. We can tell from the rock record.
I can say with almost 100% certainty that the US Pacific Northwe

Put that in Google and read away.Forget about the San Andreas, this is where the big ones come from.Fortunately not too often.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zonehttp://earthquake.usgs.gov

Not only does the Pacific plate go nowhere near Chile (the Nazca plate intervenes)... There's a hell of a lot of border of the the Pacific plate that doesn't go anywhere near California *and* hasn't had a big quake recently. (Ever heard of the Aleutian Islands?)

This just taking what we already knew (that California is at severe risk for a Big One) and wrapping it in unsourced journalistic hype.

Down in the Ozarks they had a weather device for sale that determined the weather. It was a rock hanging from string. If it was swaying, it was windy. If it was wet, it was raining. If it was gone, tornado.